That Which Cannot be Mended
by LessThanNovel
Summary: Fleeing from the Knahaten Flu, That Which Cannot be Mended tells the story of Eliarta Sacabolis as she faces the trials of being uprooted and tossed to the wind. An escape from the infected village where she was raised and eventually falling into the possession of a Telvanni Magister, she struggles to attain her freedom in order to find and free her mother.


The harvest was generous that year, with the grain curving prettily around the village and rippling outwards in a great sea of gold. Their place at the edge of the jungle was always starkest when the crops were in full bloom: the wild, untamed depths shored up behind their houses with resolute timelessness, while the fields, pristine and deliberate, waited with laden soil to be plucked and planted and plucked again in an endless cycle of impermanence. She remembered running through those fields with her hands flung out, laughing, braids trailing. Her soft, small fingers would grasp at stray weeds in the hope of finding honeysuckle flowers for a bit of sweetness. She could get lost in the fields as surely as in the jungles, but somehow she always knew she could find her way back again. Sometimes she fancied the idea that she'd be stranded out there until harvest came, and her neighbors and her parents would come scything through, cutting great swathes of gold to get to her, putting her up on their shoulders and spinning around, overjoyed that they'd found her again.

With a good harvest came bounty. It had always been that way, and when the fields were overflowing even those with the stiffest necks and sharpest tongues had a certain lightness in their step. It was more than simply the knowledge that the winter would not bring hunger: there was enough to spare for selling, and selling well, and luxuries would come gliding down the river or rolling along in wagons from those who did the trading. Strange and wonderful pelts from Bruma. Colorful satins and silks from Cheydinhal.

It was Malilda who came carting into the village with her exotic sweetfruits from Leyawiin. She was a stalwart woman, as old as the village itself, it was said, and as stubborn and unyielding as the best of them. Yet she had a softness for the young ones, and as she handed out the colorful bounty she'd brought back with her to smiling, expectant faces, she told fanciful tales of strange vendors who'd crept forth from the Black Marsh itself. How their scales glistened in the sunlight. How their feathers sprouted from their heads. The children listened, and laughed, and jostled one another as they bit into that wonderful fruit.

Malilda was the first to die. It was a shock that ripped through the village. For a week she'd been complaining about her aching bones, but she was old and laughed off their concern. When the coughing started they said it rocked her back and forth with its violence, and the healers forced teas on her as she tried to bat them off with her weathered hands, assuring them that she had survived far worse. This would kill her no more than the rest.

They found her not a day later, her eyes open and staring as she lay in her bed, blood trickling sluggishly from her ears and nose.

The children were not long behind her. Then their parents. Then the healers who wrung their hands and desperately tried to mend something they did not understand. Soon enough the people of the village were avoiding one another outright. Windows were shuttered. Doors that had never known a lock were shut tight. A silence fell over them, void of the laughter that should have come with summer, void of the excited chatter that celebrated their good fortune. Many of them blamed old Malilda herself, and suggested they should not have given her a proper burial. She should be dug up, they said. She should be left for the crows to pick at for what she'd brought down on their heads.

The people began to leave not a full month after the first death. No one could say who left first, precisely, but everyone shook their heads in disgust at the notion. Those most vocal about their disapproval were usually the first to disappear. Quietly, in the night. They didn't want it known that they'd chosen abandonment. Some of them bore the signs of illness that the others had, though they did their best to hide it. Being shunned was not the only consequence for being infected. Being shunned was the lightest sentence one could get.

It was at night when her mother came to her, candle in one hand, finger held to her lips for silence. Her mother's lovely face bore shadows of worry, of the hungry look of one spent too long with dread on her shoulders. She took her by the hand and led her towards the wagon that her father had prepared. He sat there at the front, reins in hand, the horse before him jerking its head this way and that and snorting huffily at having been roused at such an hour.

They'd tried to keep it from her, of course. They thought her too young to know, but she'd noticed things going missing steadily over the past few weeks. The essentials. The things they could not leave behind when they took flight.

She sat beside her mother in that wagon, watched her as she gripped that melting candle, watched as the wind whipped at the fragile light of its flame. The village faded into darkness quickly. Most of the hearths were unlit now. Most of them were cold and barren, and there was no telling if anyone would stoke them again.

"Falius," her mother said, her voice strained.

Her father turned his head slightly, but he kept his eyes ahead of him, steering the horse onwards.

"We'll wait a while, Falius. Find somewhere quiet a while. Make camp for a few days." The way her mother looked at her told her she was speaking vaguely on purpose. Her grip on the candle tightened. "It would be best, if we did that. It would be best if we did that before we went into one of the cities. Just in case. Just in case."

He did not answer her outright, but he dipped his head slightly, the set of his shoulders tense as he clicked his tongue and cracked the reins. Her mother's gaze fell on her again, and she watched her with a smile that twisted oddly and did not show her teeth.

"Won't that be fun, Ellie? To sleep under the stars for a while?"

Eliarta smiled back at her, and hoped she managed it better. 'I did not eat the fruit, mother,' she wanted to say. 'I did not play with the other children, mother, just like you said.' But she said none of those things. She knew the assurances would do no good.

"Yes, momma," she replied. "I love to see the stars."

They rode in silence after that, and the night swallowed them.


End file.
